Paying for New Drugs

“In case you haven’t noticed, heart disease remains a debilitating illness for millions. Cancer, despite some recent advances, has not been cured. Drug resistant strains of bacteria are spreading across the globe. There are still no effective treatments for Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and a huge number of other illnesses.

The number of new medicines being brought to market has been declining in recent years at a time when we desperately need new treatments. A recent analysis of drugs moving through FDA trials in 2003-2010 found that the overall success rate was only about 14 percent for primary indications, and a dismal 3 percent success rate for secondary indications. The number of new drugs launched annually has fallen 44 percent since 1997, according to CMR International.

A variety of reasons have been put forth to explain this deterioration, as described below. As a nation, we should be doing all that we can to encourage innovators to find effective treatments for these diseases. Developing medications to successfully treat human diseases is an expensive enterprise, so it makes sense to ask the question: where will the new medicines come from? What financial resources are available now to biomedical researchers to fund their work, and who’s going to pay for future drug development?”